Thomas Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer, detail of an oil painting by Gerlach Flicke, 1545; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Thomas Cranmer, (born July 2, 1489, Aslacton, Nottinghamshire, England—died March 21, 1556, Oxford), the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury (1533–56), adviser to the English kings Henry VIII and Edward VI. As archbishop, he put the English Bible in parish churches, drew up the Book of Common Prayer, and composed a litany that remains in use today. Denounced by the Catholic queen Mary I for promoting Protestantism, he was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake.

Early life

Cranmer was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and Agnes (née Hatfield). His father seems to have belonged to the lowest rank of the gentry; at any rate, he had only enough property to endow his eldest son, John, so that Thomas and his younger brother were destined for the church. After experiencing the teaching of a “marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster,” whose ministrations Cranmer later maintained instilled in him a permanent uncertainty and pliability, the boy went on to Cambridge in 1503. In 1510 or 1511 he was elected to a fellowship at Jesus College but was soon compelled to vacate because he married a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn. During this time he earned his living by teaching at Buckingham (later Magdalene) College, leaving his wife to lodge at the Dolphin; out of this arrangement grew a later story that he had started out in life as a hostler.

His wife died in childbirth soon after their marriage, however, and Jesus College restored Cranmer to his fellowship. He now entered the church and threw himself into his studies, becoming one of the outstanding theologians of his time, a man of immense, though not very original, learning. From about 1520 he belonged to a group of scholars who met regularly to discuss the theological problems raised by Martin Luther’s revolt; known to be inclined to the new way of thinking, they were dubbed “Little Germany.” Among the group that was to lead the English Reformation were William Tyndale, Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, and, above all, Cranmer, who by 1525 included among his prayers one for the abolition of papal power in England.

Entry into royal service

Cranmer’s ambitions for reform would have remained academic had it not been for the political events into which he was soon drawn, however contrary they were to his upbringing and tastes. From 1527 onward, Henry VIII pursued his desire to be freed from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn, and in 1529 the grips of the “divorce” controversy seized also upon Cranmer. In August a plague known as the sweating sickness swept the country and was especially severe in Cambridge. To escape the sickness, Cranmer left the town with two of his pupils—brothers who were related to him through their mother—and went to their father’s house at Waltham in Essex. The king was visiting in the immediate neighbourhood at the time, and two of his chief councillors, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox, met Cranmer in those lodgings soon afterward. Not surprisingly, they were led to discuss the king’s meditated divorce.

Henry, who was willing to secure the help of any likely head and hand, however obscure, summoned Cranmer for an interview and commanded him to lay aside all other pursuits in order to devote himself to the question of the divorce. Cranmer accepted a commission to write a propaganda treatise in the king’s interest, stating the course he proposed and defending it by arguments from Scripture, the Fathers, and the decrees of general councils. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; was appointed archdeacon of Taunton; became one of the king’s chaplains; and also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished, Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; but in the end the debates, which on the whole endorsed his position, took place in his absence. He had already been sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was dispatched to Rome in 1530, and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the pope with marked courtesy and was appointed grand penitentiary of England, but his argument, if discussed, did not lead to any practical decision of the divorce question.

In 1532 he was sent to Germany, officially as ambassador to the emperor Charles V but with instructions to establish contact with the Lutheran princes. At Nürnberg he made the acquaintance of Andreas Osiander, whose theological position midway between Luther and the old orthodoxy appealed to Cranmer’s cautious temperament, while Osiander’s niece Margaret appealed even more strongly to one who had for too long remained in uncongenial celibacy. Despite his priest’s orders, he married her in 1532; at the same time, his theological views underwent a further decided change in the direction of Reformed opinion.

Archbishop of Canterbury

The year 1532 proved to be a critical one altogether, for William Warham, the aged archbishop of Canterbury, died in August. At first the usual practice of extending the vacancy for the benefit of the king’s finances was followed, but by the end of the year it was apparent that the see would have to be filled because the divorce question was coming to a head. Thomas Cromwell’s arrival in power as chief adviser in ecclesiastical matters had heralded a more energetic policy, and by January 1533 the act against appeals to Rome was being drafted, and Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Since Stephen Gardiner, the obvious candidate for the archbishopric, was out of favour, the king chose Cranmer; by March 1533 he was consecrated and instituted at Canterbury, with the assistance of confirmatory papal bulls and after a declaration that he took the obligatory oath to the pope without feeling bound by it. He proceeded to do what was expected of him. In May he convened his court at Dunstable, declared the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon void from the beginning, and pronounced the marriage to Anne Boleyn valid.

In 1536, convinced by the dubious evidence of Anne’s alleged adulteries, he in turn invalidated that marriage; in 1540 he assisted in the freeing of Henry VIII from his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; and in 1542 he was forced to be prominent in the proceedings that resulted in Catherine Howard’s execution for treasonable unchastity. There is no question that in these matrimonial politics he did as he was told, though it is improbable that his private opinions on the issues in question in any way contradicted his public doings.

More significant are his activities as archbishop in the reconstructed church. Cranmer had not sought high promotion. His marriage just before his elevation to the archbishopric is fair proof that he expected no such career in the priesthood, in which a necessarily unacknowledged wife would be nothing but an embarrassment. Not until 1548 was he able to recognize her publicly. A story of his carrying her about with him in a chest with air holes is, however, part of the scurrilous legend that grew up around him. Once put in power, however, he could not avoid the consequences; a convinced Reformer with leanings toward a succession of Continental theological changes, he found himself assisting at the shaping of the Church of England under a master who on the whole had no taste for change. In cooperation with Cromwell, he promoted the publication of an English Bible, made compulsory in the parishes by Cromwell’s Injunctions of 1538.

Even before Henry VIII died (1547), Cranmer had drifted far in the direction of Protestantism. In 1545 he had composed a litany for the Reformed church in England, one of his masterpieces, still in use; and by 1538 he had abandoned the traditional Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation—that Christ is rendered substantially present by the Eucharist (although the properties of bread and wine remain the same)—but retained his belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As early as 1536 he was recognized by the northern religious rebels as the leading innovator. His position was, in consequence, far from comfortable after the Act of Six Articles (1539), which attacked those advocating marriage of the clergy and those denying transubstantiation, and Cromwell’s fall in 1540.

During Henry’s last years, Cranmer’s enemies laid at least three elaborate plots to destroy him by convicting him of heresy, but on each occasion they were foiled by Henry’s curious attachment to him. In Cranmer this king, who as a rule kept himself entirely free from personal feelings for his servants and advisers, found a man whom he both trusted and liked. Unlike the rest of them, the archbishop was neither greedy nor devious; he sought nothing for himself, alone was willing to plead for those who fell into disfavour (a service he performed with equal courage and futility for Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, and others), and miraculously retained Henry’s goodwill throughout. The king regarded him with that mixture of awe and amusement that the worldly and selfish bestow on those who appear simple in affairs; he liked him, listened to him, protected him, but allowed him no political influence whatsoever. It was not surprising that he turned to Cranmer when death came.

With the accession of Edward VI (Henry’s only child by his third wife, Jane Seymour) in 1547, Cranmer’s time really arrived. From the first, the young king’s guardian, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, demonstrated his intention to transform the Church of England into a Protestant church. When he fell in 1549, the expected Catholic reaction did not take place, because John Dudley (later the duke of Northumberland), who had ousted Seymour, decided to introduce an even more extreme brand of Reformed religion.

In the doctrinal labours demanded by these changes, Cranmer took the chief and directing part. In 1547 he was responsible for the publication of a Book of Homilies designed to meet the notorious grievance that the unreformed clergy did not preach enough. The first prayer book, moderately Protestant, appeared in 1549, to be followed in 1552 by the second, which was more outspokenly Protestant. Cranmer was personally responsible for much of the work, but he had the assistance of a number of foreign theologians for whom Edward VI’s England acted as a magnet. The most influential of these was probably Martin Bucer from Strasbourg, whose position on the Eucharist is reflected especially in the Communion service of the second prayer book. It was not so much Bucer, however, who persuaded Cranmer away from the vague Lutheranism, which seems to have been his position in 1547, as either the Pole Jan Laski the Younger or the Englishman Nicholas Ridley, both men possessed of a more determined and unquestioning temper than was the archbishop. The ferment of those years also produced Cranmer’s Forty-two Articles (1553), a set of doctrinal formulas defining the dogmatic position of the Church of England on current religious controversies. All clergy, schoolmasters, and degree candidates in the universities were compelled to subscribe to the articles, which were later reduced to 39 and officially accepted by the Anglican church.

At this time Cranmer also attempted to revise the canon law of the English church, a proposal never enacted but published in 1571 as the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (“The Reformation of Ecclesiastical Laws”). Though still deprived of any serious influence in affairs of state, Cranmer dominated and guided the religious revolution of the reign by his learning, authority, and diligence. He settled in turn the doctrine, ritual, and law of his church in a manner that was to remain. Above all, the Church of England owed to him the beauty of its liturgy, which shows him to have been not only a theologian but something of a poet.

Trial for heresy

Edward VI’s approaching death (July 1553) at long last involved Cranmer fatally in politics. After prolonged resistance, he allowed himself to be forced by the dying king to subscribe the document by which Northumberland hoped to upset custom, statute law, and the will of Henry VIII in order to transfer the succession from the princess Mary (Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon) to his daughter-in-law, the great-niece of Henry, Lady Jane Grey. Although proclaimed queen, she was deposed nine days later, and Mary I acceded to the throne. The failure of the plot brought charges of treason against Cranmer, and he was condemned by Mary’s government in November 1553. It had in any case become obvious before this that his future held no more bright promises. Mary’s accession temporarily destroyed the English Reformation; Cranmer’s embittered enemy Stephen Gardiner was at once released from imprisonment and promoted to the chancellorship, and in November 1554 Cardinal Reginald Pole arrived to occupy Canterbury and direct the extirpation of heresy.

Cranmer’s trial for treason was but a pretext; the queen and her advisers did not intend him to die for the technical offense of having supported Northumberland’s insane conspiracy but meant to destroy him for his long-standing offense in promoting Protestantism. They had to wait until they could get Parliament to repeal the acts of Henry VIII and Edward VI and to reintroduce the laws that enabled the secular arm to burn heretics. With Ridley and Hugh Latimer, a Protestant who had formerly been bishop of Worcester, Cranmer in March 1554 was removed to Oxford, where the Counter-Reformation felt safer than in Cranmer’s own university. Late in that year the heresy laws were revived, and in September 1555, after enfeebling imprisonment, Cranmer was subjected to a long trial in which he stoutly defended himself against the charge of having unjustifiably departed from his own earlier position on the sacraments and the papacy. The foregone conclusion was arrived at after a variety of technical processes; on February 14, 1556, in a ceremony full of carefully designed humiliation, he was degraded from his episcopal and sacerdotal offices and handed over to the state.

Martyrdom

But Mary’s government was not done with him yet. The burning of the archheretic would be an even more useful deed if he could be made to renounce his errors in public, and so a number of ways were tried to break him down. The previous October he had been forced to witness the martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer; now he was temporarily removed from prison into more pleasant surroundings while government agents tried to stir up his doubts. In fact, Cranmer signed five so-called recantations, of which the first four did no more than record his consistent belief that what monarch and Parliament had decreed must be obeyed by all Englishmen. His convictions on this point logically forced him to accept the Marian Counter-Reformation as valid, and this acceptance, in turn, in his weak and uncertain state, not unaffected by the delay of death and the faint hope of mercy, finally induced him to make an abject recantation (the sixth) of his whole religious development.

The government had every reason to hope that the publication of Cranmer’s defection would wreck Protestantism in England. Although the vengeful Gardiner had died, Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole were quite determined that the sentence must be carried out. Thus, on March 21, 1556, Cranmer was taken out to be burned, being first required to make his recantation public. The proximity of death, however, restored both his faith and his dignity. With nothing to lose and only peace of soul to gain, he shocked his enemies by disavowing his recantation and emphatically reasserting that the pope’s power was usurped and transubstantiation untrue. At one blow Cranmer undid all that government propaganda had achieved and restored heart to the surviving Reformers. Then he went to his death. As he had promised, he steadfastly held his right hand—which “had offended” by signing the false recantations—into the flame until it was consumed. His brave and dignified end made an enormous impression.

Assessment

Cranmer was a very human man who in consequence has attracted a good deal of obloquy from those who have not had to share his tribulations and temptations. Essentially a scholar, he lacked the strength that single-mindedness and fanaticism instill into the less reflective. He has sometimes been thought of as infirm in moral purpose, but this is to misjudge him. His doubts at the last were cleverly induced by mental torture, and his gradual development away from traditional orthodoxy into more and more definitely Protestant views during the Reformation represents fairly the spiritual career of a man who obeyed reason rather than instinct.

Cranmer was always learning and was never ashamed to admit it; his was essentially a humble temper. He had not sought high office and did not particularly enjoy it, though he valued his place for the chance it gave him to promote the changes that he came to regard as essential to the establishment of God’s truth. He refused to bear malice or to punish those who traduced him. When Cromwell once told him, in some exasperation, that the “popish knaves” would have his eyes and cut his throat before he would do something about it, Cranmer turned the prophecy with a shrug. In a persecuting age he stood out for his clemency, though in 1550 he did take part in the trial and burning of Joan Bocher. It should be remembered, however, that she was condemned for open blasphemy in denying the Trinity, the one offense that all the church had regarded as unforgivable ever since the struggle with Arianism. For the authority of the church, Cranmer had a high respect, which, for instance, appears in his revision of the canon law.

It was part of his religious beliefs that he owed obedience to the king; though he did not worship the state, he served it as a matter of principle. This position did not, as is sometimes alleged, make him servile; alone of Henry VIII’s councillors, Cranmer time and again spoke up for the unpopular victim of the moment, and his tart criticism of the king’s theology and grammar in the debates over the King’s Book of 1543 speaks well for his courage. Cranmer alone stood up to the duke of Northumberland when everyone else quailed before him.

These occasional disputes only underline the fact that with him submission to royal authority was a fundamental, indeed a doctrinal, tenet. Though perhaps more consistent in this than most, he only stressed more heavily what nearly everybody held at the time. His other guiding star was his study of theology, in which he discarded the arid aftermath of late medieval Scholasticism and turned instead to Scripture and the early Church Fathers. His belief in the divine right of kings to rule the church as well as the state and his biblical theology made him the characteristic Anglican of his day: the intellectual and in part the spiritual founder-father of the Reformed church in England.